THE SANITY OF EXPRESSING GREEN
TO THE BLIND MAN
AND THE RESULTING INSANITY
The question:
I shout to be heard, alone in the darkness of words.
There’s a need to explain what I see with my brain?
There’s a need to tell you of green and the million
shades in between?
And a need to express blue and what it could mean to
you?
Please, could you colour inside this blind man’s
eyes the azure of the skies?
The answer:
Vacant dead eyes stare back at me
And mumble incoherence.
I answer with my eyes in the same tone of voice
In those hushed tones that make such a noise
And as a blind man I stumble from word to word
Wrangling insanely with dictionaries learned…
The struggle:
Reverse perspective inverts my world
And shouting quiet screams from the brightly lit dark
No one to hear or see me retch out question marks!
And alone in my mind I chew on a word
Sightless in this quest to express the colour of dragonfly
or bird
For the colour of nothing is all this voice can screen
Words are deaf to the language of red or yellow or blue
or green.
Only in imagination can the orb of truth illuminate
my enlightenment
And only upon the image can the sphere sparkle facets
explode the pitching sky.
And here I stand alone in the crowded room with the
dead eyed
And here we choke on too much of nothing to say
And gaze at too much of nothing to see.
Just that man in the mirror staring back at me.
Oh! For my tongue to dance in the light!
Oh! To express the green exactly as seen!
Oh! To express the clouds rolling by on a blue carpeted
sky!
Oh! How desperate I am to express this diamond existence!
Each facet a prism, bright with perspective, flowering
iridescence!
Born on the freedom of language in voice, the challenge
echoes,
But dumb is this blind poet’s tongue bound and
shackled!
For how to shine the truth at an eye set in a head too
long dead?
To lyrically express the simple magnificence of purple
or red?
And who is this poet to say which is the true hue of
blue?
And how to colour inside the blind man’s eyes
the azure of the skies?
The pain:
One humbled poet with too much of everything to say
Condemned to gag on empty words as everything wastes
away!
Wasted to the limited noun dribbling from the mouth
of a clown!
Puny words of perceived rational lie naked in the fog
of irrational.
Worse than useless these dead-weight labels,
Mutterings from mouths of babes in cradles.
Words rattle the bars of this cage, once a crisp white
page,
As I attempt to free the hue of my truth to you.
And I find that I’m but a poetless oaf!
And the words that blind me remain my only proof
No key to express what this world means to me.
And I need to escape my reflection, escape this prison
Words that had once freed my imagination now lock it
from reason!
The result:
But… At least now I have a good grasp of the
word ‘but’…
And again I try to colour the sky,
But the noise of my silence is too much to bear,
And those vacant dead eyes continue to stare.
And I shout to heard, alone in the darkness of words.
Tim Rees
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